


The Traveller

by Unsentimentalf



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Gen, Post-Nuclear War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-29
Updated: 2017-07-29
Packaged: 2018-12-08 13:45:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,476
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11647767
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Unsentimentalf/pseuds/Unsentimentalf
Summary: For the last month there had been only him, still wiser than he was desperate, waiting out the half lives until the last possible minute. That minute had now been reached.   The radiation level would still be lethal in a short time out there, the tablets and suit little protection.   His only chance would be to get out of London as soon as possible.  If there was a provisional government it would need him. If there wasn’t, there was somewhere else he needed to get to.For the Nuclear Holocaust prompt.





	The Traveller

It was time to leave.

Mycroft rested his hand on the wheel that would open the thick steel door, for a moment hesitant to do anything so conclusive after the months of waiting. Behind him the generator coughed and spluttered through the last traces of fuel. The Geiger counter ticked, so constant that it took an effort to hear it. The radio was still silent as it had been all along. 

Every time one of his erstwhile colleagues had left a little invisible dust had come in and the counter had ticked just a little faster. And they had all left in the end. Most of them had gone in the first week, being foolish, being irrational, being attached to other people, somehow believing that they could have their lives back in the face of all the evidence. They would all be dead by now. 

The others had gone too, in a reverse order of wisdom that Mycroft could had predicted from the start, until for the last month there had been only him, still wiser than he was desperate, waiting out the half lives until the last possible minute. That minute had now been reached. The radiation level would still be lethal in a short time out there, the tablets and suit little protection. His only chance would be to get out of London as soon as possible. If there was a provisional government it would need him. If there wasn’t, there was somewhere else he needed to get to.

The long brick lined tunnel under Whitehall had to be still passable since no-one had come back to tell him that they couldn’t get out. He found that there were more bodies than he expected; apparently many of those civil servants who hadn’t merited an official place in Emergency Government Accommodation #3 to #5 had found their way down to the tunnels anyway and died there on the wrong side of the doors. Among them must be people he’d worked with but he made no attempt to identify them. It was sufficient to assume that everyone who had been within the M25 on 8 August 2017 was dead, himself being a significant but likely temporary exception. 

Instead Mycroft congratulated himself for his long ago foresight. An environment suit, boots and spare masks had been part of the small pile of items, along with anti- radiation tablets, torch, utility knife and pistol, that he had hidden away in one of the secure lockers even before the first bomb had hit, while his colleagues had been drinking tea and joking about the inevitable false alarm. The shelter had been designed and stocked for twenty four but after temporary visitors to the building that day had argued seniority and indispensability thirty one people had occupied it. There had, later on, been shortages of equipment and consequent bitter and occasionally violent arguments. Now the suit prevented biological contamination and kept some of the radioactive dust from reaching his lungs but he knew that it would not be enough. Speed above everything else might save him.

Even so, Mycroft stopped when he reached the foot of the stairs. Someone had pushed the bodies aside and there was about a foot of clear red brick stairway winding upwards next to the iron railing. They had all lost weight on the tinned and packeted rations with vitamin pills but there had been no method of exercise and he was already exhausted from the walk to this point. 

Speed saves. Slowness kills. He started to climb

Ten minutes later he was having yet another brief rest when he noticed that there was less light. For a moment he feared that his torch battery was unaccountably failing but after a second he realised that the difference was in his surroundings. The stair, the roof and even the bodies were blackened here. The hand he’d rested on the wall came away ebony with soot. Mycroft started up again. After another few minutes he could see daylight high above him and eventually he emerged into a grey skied early winter’s day. 

Whitehall had burned; not the fires of the Blitz but the firestorm of a holocaust. Every where he looked were black ruins and rubble and the brittle, twisted skeletons of vehicles. He’d expected to wade through corpses but everything that could burn had been cremated into ash. The city had been scoured clean of death as well as life.

There would be no message for him from the Government left here. Mycroft started to walk through the black mud towards the remains of the Houses of Parliament, the Elizabeth Tower now just a stub of irregular stonework slightly higher than the rest. Two things caught his eye in the black monotony at the same time. The first was one of the huge cogs from Big Ben, lying half broken on what had been the Westminster lawn. Three months of rain must have rubbed off the soot and the top of it gleamed very dully. 

The second was a grey shape on the road. As Mycroft approached he could see that it was a human figure, unburned. Ash had blown over the white environmental suit that was a match for Mycroft’s own but it still showed up as a lighter grey than the rest. Mycroft started to run, his heart pounding with the exertion, down towards the wide river.

The tender seemed to be a gift from the Fates. It must had been blasted off whatever larger boat it was attached to by the explosions and had been under the water during the fires. At some point the fast river and the twice daily tides had brought it up to the tiny sand beach where at the current low tide its prow stuck out of the water. A cormorant had stood there, wings spread, as Mycroft searched through the wrecked craft. It had taken off as he came near, skimming low across the water as London’s cormorants always had. Surely it must be an interloper, flown up from the coast. Mycroft didn’t imagine that any of London’s land wildlife could have survived. 

It took Mycroft a long time to haul the tiny boat up and his suit and gloves were thick with river silt, but when empty it floated well enough. There were no oars to be found but he found a long metal pole.

The last time he had been punting was on the slow moving Cherwell, a quarter of a century ago, with his impatient younger brother incessantly demanding his turn. Oxford would be gone, Mycroft thought with the first moment of real distress since he’d left the bunker. He had long ago memorised the list of potential targets in the UK and Northern Ireland, major cities, military bases, industrial centres. Oxford was high enough to have been hit. No more punting on the river, pushing his way through the overhanging willow leaves. No more picnics beside the Isis. The college libraries, all irreplaceable, all gone. 

He snorted, recognising the trick his brain was playing. That the charred ruins as far as he could see around him was all that would ever be left of his London was too much for even the most rational human mind to comprehend, so he mourned instead for a place he’d barely thought of for decades, for experiences he would certainly never have the time or inclination to repeat. He didn’t have time for this. For as long as he stayed here he was dying. 

Mycroft stayed as close as he could to the edge of the Thames, using the pole to push his way clear when the boat got caught up in the remains of half sunken vessels and building rubble. Even so it was a great deal faster than walking and he was feeling quite smug about his own competence until he came through the heat twisted leftmost arch of Southwark Bridge and saw what lay on the other side. 

London Bridge has fallen down after all, he thought with a flicker of semi-hysterical amusement. Its remains and the debris washed up against it by the river reached from one side of the river to the other and the logjam stretched for best part of a hundred yards upstream of where the bridge had stood. There was nothing to do but push his way to shore, abandon his craft and clamber very awkwardly and with not a few bruises and worries about tears in his suit up the pile of debris to the high bank. His river trip had got him barely a couple of miles. 

After that he walked, past places that he often would not have recognised if he hadn’t known the city so precisely. The O2 stadium was a handful of broken struts pointing at the sky but the sight of seagulls picking at something nearby cheered him a little. By the time he reached the Docklands he was so tired that he was nearly ready to lie down and wait for death but it was there that he saw the first green shoots, poking through the mud and he realised that he was reaching the edge of where the fires had raged. The buildings slowly became less damaged, roofs destroyed and window frames hollow but walls often almost intact. The black mud everywhere that must have been ash before three months of weather was much less deep here than in Whitehall and the grass was slowly winning out, even this late in the year. 

Where the fire hadn’t reached there had been nothing to dispose of the corpses.. Mycroft did his best to ignore them, glad at least that it was too cold for flies. He remembered the little pier south of the airport and made his way down to it. This time his luck was really in; the 20 ft luxury cruiser he found still tied up by a steel hawser had a working engine, the key in the ignition and most of a tank of fuel. He tipped the rather soggy remains of the previous occupant over into the river without a qualm, only wondering briefly what last minute desperate plan the person had being trying to put into effect to escape the bombs. Maybe for much of London they had come without any warning at all. Mycroft had certainly not left orders to issue an alarm; what point would there have been? Londoners, aside from the occupants of the Emergency Government Accommodation, had nowhere to hide, and if it had turned out to be a false alarm there would have been consequences from panicking the city and the country. 

The river was much clearer this far downstream and he could take the boat into the middle of the current so he travelled rapidly now, the nature of the devastation changing almost by the minute. Still the ash everywhere but every so often he’d see a bit of green on the surviving trees or buildings that still looked almost intact but he still saw no sign of human life. Doubtless anyone who’d stayed this close to ground zero would had succumbed to radiation sickness months ago. 

By the time he passed Tilbury Docks the English countryside looked much as it always had in winter, grey-green and lifeless, the buildings still standing with glass intact. Mycroft could feel the cold breath of both ghosts on the back of his neck, the historical Elizabeth and the Queen he’d served. “Foul scorn, indeed” he agreed with them. “Has any councillor ever made such a poor job of defending your England? But at least your enemies are doubtless thoroughly cast down as well, if that’s the least consolation. Mutual assured destruction operated exactly as promised.” 

That, he regretted most. The rest of it had been in the end outside his power to control, being other people’s screw up rather than the British Government’s, but he had never intended that the decision to retaliate should truly rest with the Prime Minister of the day, PMs being without exception unqualified, irrational and quite quite stupid. Somehow the authority had got past him while he was preoccupied with other elements of the crisis and gone to the person who the official rules said it should go to, and as a consequence whatever proportion remained of Britain’s rather pathetic nuclear deterrent that hadn’t already been taken out by an enemy which he’d always insisted would have no trouble tracking a few nuclear subs at sea had been ordered to fire on a population that had no more responsibility for the actions of their own government than any population did. 

Maybe Trident had turned out to be a damp squib. Maybe none of the missiles survived to be fired, or maybe they had exploded on places that had already been obliterated by bombs that he never had any control over. Maybe there wasn’t a single death on his conscience from that particular quarter. Maybe there were a million deaths. The chances that there ever would be an accurate reconstruction of events and an full accounting seemed remote, remoter still the chance that he’d survive to see it. 

The sky was darkening with early winter dusk. The suit’s water supply had been exhausted. Mycroft hadn’t eaten since he left the bunker before dawn but he was too nauseous to be hungry, or perhaps his nausea was hunger, hunger or too many corpses and a journey through the end of the world. Or perhaps it was the radiation already. He had believed himself not a man to turn away from the truth even at its harshest, but he’d left the geiger counters and the radiation monitoring badges back in the bunker. It would kill him or it wouldn’t. 

Too close to London still to dare stop for the night; he pressed on slower through the gloom, the cruiser’s navigation lights glittering on the surface of the water. The GPS system showed that he had reached the start of the estuary, the river half a mile wide now. There were still lights bobbing on many of the buoys. Out into the North Sea and it was dark now. He reluctantly cut the engine and crawled into the small cabin to fold down the bed, strip off the filthy suit and sleep naked under the thick blankets provided.

He woke to a thunderous noise that it took a second to identify as rain. Dull daylight filled the cabin. The downfall beat down on him as he emerged on deck, the water bitterly cold but clean. He could see nothing around the boat but rain and waves. For a minute or so he did his best to scrub himself down as he shivered, then he ducked inside again and put on an oversized thick dark green cable knit jumper and corduroy trousers from the steel locker in the cabin and the waterproofs and wellingtons hanging by the entrance to the galley. Outside again, he found much to his relief that at least a pint of water had collected in the fabric awning over the front deck. Rainwater might be safe- he decanted it into a bottle from the galley and drank deeply. He briefly considered trying to clean the blackened and stinking suit, but settled for the more realistic solution of kicking it overboard. 

Food next- Mycroft was sure that hunger was stopping him thinking clearly. He raided the galley cupboards and laid out out the limited supplies in food to consider with both greed and foreboding. Anything unsealed had to go, anything in cardboard wrapping, anything past its use by date. In the end he ate two tins of warmed baked beans and felt a great deal better and barely nauseous at all. Most of the rest he threw overboard, out of temptation’s reach, but he kept a a large bar of probably highly radioactive Dairy Milk chocolate aside. If it turned out that he was dying regardless of all his precautions he would eat that as consolation. 

The navigation system’s GPS told him that the boat had drifted east north east overnight and he was at no risk of hitting land any time soon. He set a course towards the coast, turned the engine on and divided his attention between the navigation controls, the view of the rain in front of the prow and the boat’s radio.

FM was, for reasons he couldn’t guess at, completely silent. At 198 LW, where Radio Four had broadcast since implementation of the Geneva Frequency Plan of 1975, a voice read out in shipping forecast tones. 

“Middlesborough 28th November. Berwick Upon Tweed 30 November...”

Mycroft cut the engine. Turning the radio up to full power he shot back into the cabin, pulled out the folded table and grabbed a set of marker pens from the map box. Scribbling a rough map of the UK on the Formica table surface, he marked with a small black circle every place mentioned. 

When the voice had circumnavigated mainland Britain and was again droning about Berwick, Mycroft dropped the pen and stared at the map for several minutes. Then he picked up the red marker and started adding crosses for the air force and naval bases around the UK coast that were the most probable targets on a minimal strike. Then he marked with green crosses the next tier of possible targets.

Done with that, he sat and looked at the map again. The black circles and the red crosses patterned the map between them, hardly ever coinciding. Portsmouth was gone of course, as were Plymouth and Bristol. Coastal Wales might well be substantially intact. Liverpool was dead but there was a red cross over an unexpected black circle in Glasgow. There was an error rate among nuclear missiles. just as among everything else. No circles in Northern Scotland which might simply mean that someone had decided that most of the inhabitants of Northern Scotland were far enough from the radiation to be safest where they were. No black circle for Edinburgh, but it could be covered by the Glasgow evacuation. Newcastle was gone but the long East Coast from there down with its many military bases was not much more than guesswork. 

The green crosses were far more satisfactorily jumbled together with the circles, overlapping in a reassuring number of places, evidence that while first tier targets had been hit, second tier were at least substantially untouched. That gave him an estimate for hits on inland bases as well and hence a conclusion that the total number of warheads had been between thirty and fifty. That was far more than the warning shot that until now he’d still hoped that London’s destruction had been but a tiny fraction of the total available firepower on either side. It had been World War Three, not a skirmish, but some people somewhere might have still held back from throwing every last thing into it. “It might have been worse” he said aloud, shocking himself with the hollowness of his voice. 

The information he now had taunted him in its inadequacy. He ran through the rest of the radio settings looking for anything else. The radio signals weren’t clear; he found a couple of channels with someone speaking English but he couldn’t make out more than the occasional word. On medium wave he found stations in French and Dutch discussing relatively parochial post-Holocaust matters of medical services, local community organisation and, in the rolling Dutch accent that he’d always associated with that calm good humoured civilised nation, the public execution of a gang who had preyed on refugees. It had been three months, he supposed. They would have long since had their fill of discussing the things he so desperately wanted to know: exactly had happened and why, and who was now in charge of the UK government. 

The rain was easing off as Mycroft started the engine again. By noon the boat was gliding up the Suffolk coast. From that distance things looked normal enough. There were gulls in profusion but no sign of human activity.

Mycroft turned into Lowestoft Harbour and tied up the boat at one of the piers. Every single berth was empty, The roads down to the harbour were blocked as far as he could see with empty cars. many with doors and boots left wide open. There had been an evacuation here, and if here then likely everywhere around the coast. Dunkirk would have been a picnic compared to the size of this. It was a good sign. If people had survived here long enough to bury their dead and take boats away then the residual radiation here three months later was unlikely to kill him in a few hours. 

Mycroft left the boat and started to walk past the cars up the main road inland, gun in hand. He had been hoping to find notices about the emergency or the evacuation pinned to official noticeboards but when he passed the town hall there were nothing but old civic election nominations and declarations and adverts for playgroups. The fairground was silent and in the town there had obviously been looting. He passed an electrical good shop with a huge television lying where it had been dropped as someone struggled to get it out through the broken glass. Surely done early, he thought. Even the stupidest looter must have worked out fairly soon that the National Grid was down permanently. There had been fires too in places, suggesting riots, but no bodies in the streets.

That last was solved as he walked past the playing fields. A JCB stood in the centre, surrounded by long rows of earth piled four foot high that covered the multiple football pitches, leaving only the white goalposts at the end. Seagulls picked at the overturned soil, rising in a raucous cloud as he came closer. Mass graves with room for thousands. He was getting a picture now; many deaths, some rioting but enough organisation left to collect and bury the bodies and to ensure the evacuation was reasonably orderly and remarkably complete, as well; he had yet to encounter anyone left behind, alive or death, out on the road. He didn’t intend to start looking in the houses.

Eventually the solid line of cars tapered out. Mycroft considered the scattered vehicles blocking the road ahead and started looking out for a functional bicycle. As he searched a ginger tabby cat skittered from the sight of him but the crows merely hopped a short way away. He heard barking in the distance a couple of times but if feral dogs were hunting they didn’t have his trail. Eventually he came upon a bike shop that had only partially been emptied, although the glass shards everywhere inside and out didn’t bode well for tyres. A ladies upright at the back of the shop had panniers already fitted; he filled them with a dozen spare tyres, a puncture repair kit and a foot pump and then carried it carefully out into the road and down one of the side streets that seemed to have been less affected by the troubles. 

Even so he had to change his tyres four times on the journey through the town. The residential back streets had significantly less glass but they did have bodies. Mycroft counted twenty three humans and six dead animals as he pedalled up away from the sea and there would be more in the houses themselves. There were always people resistant to any evacuation, or overlooked, or too sick to move. His brain as ever made the estimates, did the calculations and drew the conclusions,. Mycroft had seen his share of civil emergency evacuation plans and he knew that 95% was considered the maximum achievable evacuation rate. Lowestoft had had a population of around 70,000. If those graves held 10,000 then there might be three thousand people left behind, mostly dying slowly in their beds. Maybe some of them were still alive but if so he saw no sign of them. Yet the radio had declared that were still evacuations, so the country must not be completely dead or emptied yet. He was still contemplating this as he passed more piles of heaped earth in the field on the edge of town and had to redo all his calculations.

Radiation or possibly neglect had done for the sheep; there were hundreds of white wool heaps in the fields. Winter crops of wheat had grown high, unharvested. A herd of beef bullocks were occupying a lane that Mycroft needed to take; he took one look at their stance as they stared at him, horns lowered and found himself a different route. He had no idea whether they looked sick or not, just that they looked aggressive. On the other hand the fox that limped across the road in front of his bike was definitely unwell. 

For the last couple of miles he felt as sick as that fox himself, his legs weak and aching and his breathing laboured. He had taken a look around a supermarket in Lowestoft in search of something to eat but all the shelves that would have held tins or packets were bare. It was as likely that his destination would be equally barren but somehow he couldn’t imagine his parents’ cottage without food, good, wholesome, delicious food. He turned the corner in the village, thinking about scones, and tumbled off the bike in shock.

The holocaust of London had reached all the way to this quiet corner after him. The cottage was as much of a blackened ruin as Whitehall had been, roofless with gaping holes for windows and half the walls fallen in. As Mycroft picked himself up and went forward he could tell , without any doubt, that the fire had been far fiercer than natural. Accelerants had been used and no-one had tried to put it out. Someone, even as England was dying, had come out here to murder his parents. 

He stood in the empty doorway. The roof had fallen in on the floor which in turn had fallen in on the cellar that had been converted some time ago, at his insistence, into a moderately effective bomb shelter. That’s where they would have been, under tonnes of burned brick, stone and steel rubble. 

“Eurus!” he shouted. Surely she would be here to watch his discovery. Nothing moved. “Eurus!” he called again, and again until finally his voice gave out and he collapsed, weeping with grief and frustration, on the front lawn. 

That achieved nothing, of course, so eventually he stood up again and walked slowly around the shell of the house, because all he could do now was witness. 

“Tell them I came, and no-one answered. That I kept my word,” he murmured as he came around the kitchen door. The garden gate and part of the fence had been knocked flat and Mycroft could just make out the remains of tyre marks across his mother’s kitchen garden and broken pea stakes. She’d driven up to the back door to unload whatever she’d used to set the fire. 

He walked slowly over to the fallen gate. The slatted wooden fence had been crushed flat into the grass and one strand of the variegated ivy that had covered it had already started creeping up the elderly apple tree set in the lawn. Mycroft turned back to look at the ruined house and stopped abruptly. 

There was a tiny curl of smoke coming up from under the crumbled brickwork, about three foot inside the gap that had been the kitchen door, about where the utility room had housed the washing machine. Mycroft dragged the broken gate over to rest on the rubble and awkwardly crawled out onto it. He could just reach to push his hand between the bricks where the smoke was emerging. They were detectably warm. A little of the fire must still be smouldering.

Mycroft walked back across the sodden lawn to knee in the mud by the apple tree, running a hand along the long strand of ivy, pulling it away from its adhesion to the rough bark. It had been raining very heavily. The fire had been set maybe a week ago at most. The ivy had grown a foot at least, and when he went back to check, the winter brassicas in the garden had grown to cover most of the barely visible impressions of the car wheel. Now he could see what had happened as if it was taking place before him. 

His father, driving the car up here to load it when they left, keeping their exposure to the fall-out minimal. His sister, arriving weeks later to find no-one here. Of course she had burned the house. Burning things that hurt her was was she did. 

He had just finished wiping the entirely unnecessary water from his eyes when under one of the cabbage leaves he saw a glint of colour. The object sat on his palm, muddy red and black plastic, as he sat down on the charred kitchen step. It was a toy car.

 

Mycroft saw his first survivor about a mile from the edge of Ipswich. She turned as she heard the motorcycle engine, an elderly figure with a bright red rucksack holding up a huge rainbow patterned umbrella. He was going to stop but she waved him on impatiently and turned back to carry on walking. She has enough time, he thought, and let her alone. 

There were more as he skirted the town, walking or cycling south east, in ones, twos or larger groups. There were wheelchairs and dogs and hand carts, people supported between others, people limping on their own, lots of umbrellas against the heavy rain. By the time he reached Felixstowe he had seen close on fifty would-be evacuees and the container port itself was full of more. A handful of little boats ferried people unable to walk the last few miles down the river from Ipswich. The main building held rows upon rows of mattresses for the sick, and as he glanced in he saw that some of the bodies on the mattresses had their faces covered. 

The total crowd, sick, well and dead, numbered about five hundred. There were very few children and a high proportion of people over sixty; these would be the last and most reluctant evacuees. Some people were deep in conversation but many others would say nothing and meet no-one’s eyes. Thin looking dogs barked at each other and at the couple of annoyed looking cats in baskets that had been brought along. Mycroft could find no-one who knew anything about the evacuation beyond what the radio had told them. The limited level of organisation he had found at the port was all just a matter of people seeing what needed to be done and doing it. 

Eventually his search for information took him back into the main building and for the first time he noticed that the far wall had been covered in a thousand bits of paper; photos, names, prayers, memorials and messages. A score of people were standing, reading them. An exercise in futility, he thought after looking at a few and he was about to turn away when the letters caught his eye.

The poster had found fluorescent purple paper from somewhere, had pinned their message exactly at the height of his gaze in the perfect centre of the board. Even so he nearly missed it; someone had stuck a photo up that obscured the first three letters and there was just **ROFT** in thick black pen. He reached out to rip it down. 

It was written in his father’s familiar neat script and dated five weeks ago.

 

“Dear Mycroft,

You’ll be pleased to hear that your alterations to the cellar turned out very well so all Mummy’s digging was worthwhile! Your brother insists that we tell you that since you failed to stop World War Three you should at least come and do your share of the babysitting. You are really not to take any notice of him, though- we are sure you did everything you possibly could about the war. Sherlock says that we are being evacuated to Sweden, although nobody here seems to know very much. We have always wanted to visit Stockholm. Do come and join us as soon as you can, love Mummy and Daddy xxx”

As he read it again, there were raised voices, a tumult that spread through the building and then a ragged cheer. Mycroft followed the crowd out to where they spread along the docks in the rain, peering out to sea. On the horizon, blurred in the heavy rain, he could just make out the shape of a tall ship.

THE END


End file.
